prosthetic knowledge

Polaroid Cacher 

Student project from Adrià Navarro and DI Shin turns an old Polaroid camera into desktop printer, designed to capture special moments in your online life - video embedded below:

Polaroid Cacher from Adrià Navarro on Vimeo.

The Polaroid Cacher is a camera that allows you to take traditional instant pictures of your digital experiences. It’s an ambient device, part physical and part digital, meant to address the fleeting nature of online interactions.

We believe that our daily online activity –conversations, discoveries, games– is as meaningful as our activity in the physical world and, as such, should be preserved the same way we try to capture every important moment in our life. Especially because most of this experiences will be soon forgotten, lost under layers of information, databases and outdated services.

Given the powerful association of instant photography with memories, people and nostalgia –rather than with photographic quality– we designed our camera as a fictional Polaroid product. One that captures digital media in a traditional analog format, as means to create tangible, durable mementos of our digital life.

More Here

The Pinhole CCTV Camera Template 

A papercraft CCTV camera to make and install for yourself, and create pinhole photographs:

In tweleve simple stages, you can turn this five page template into a functioning pinhole CCTV camera. This pinhole camera accepts photographic paper and produces 2”x2.5” prints.

Available at the Made By store here

Camera IMAGO 1:1

The World’s largest walk-in camera:

Measuring 7x4x3 metres the camera Imago 1:1 is the largest walk in camera in the world and has been so ever since its invention in the 1970’s by the physicist Werner Krause and the artist Erhard Hößle.

As a result of the camera’s unique design it is able to take and print incomparable life-sized portraits on specially developed black and white paper. For their graphic quality, one to one reproduction and once off recording of a moment in time these pictures are a unique and lasting portrait.

The video embedded below shows the camera in action (German):

You can find out more here

Hands-Free Videophone 

Prototype from Japan worn as glasses, with cameras INSIDE it capture and project real-time facial information onto a 3D avatar - via DigInfo:

NTT Docomo has developed the Hands-Free Videophone, which enables video calls without having to hold the camera. This is part of docomo’s research on creating future glasses-type devices.

The Hands-Free Videophone captures the user’s face with three cameras in each of the left and right sides of the frames. The video sent to the other person is created by combining the pictures with a pre-rendered 3D model of the users face.

“Each camera has 720p resolution, and a fish-eye lens, with a 180-degree field of view. This is the High Definition picture currently being captured in real time. If you look at the face, you can see it’s really distorted, because the fish-eye lens is so close. The distortion is compensated, and the picture is combined with a 3D model of the person in the computer. Currently, priority is given to the part around the eyes. As you can see when the man closes his eyes, the eyelids and the corners of the eyes appear quite realistic. Such a level of realism is hard to achieve with models like CG-based avatars, where parts are overlaid on the face.”

More at DigInfo here

Cooperative Quadrocopter Ball Throwing and Catching 

Smart quadrocopters work together to catch moving objects - video embedded below:

This video shows three quadrocopters cooperatively tossing and catching a ball with the aid of an elastic net.

To toss the ball, the quadrocopters accelerate rapidly outward to stretch the net tight between them and launch the ball up. Notice in the video that the quadrocopters are then pulled forcefully inward by the tension in the elastic net, and must rapidly stabilize in order to avoid a collision. Once recovered, the quadrotors cooperatively position the net below the ball in order to catch it.

Because they are coupled to each other by the net, the quadrocopters experience complex forces that push the vehicles to the limits of their dynamic capabilities. 

Park of the research work carried out by EDH to test mobile robots.

More Here

Photogotchi 

Soon-to-be-released digital filter camera app gamifies process with 8-Bit look and a virtual pet:

Photogotchi App Trailer - for iPhone and Windows Phone from CarnationGroup on Vimeo.

Featuring a fast camera with five unique filters in the 8-bit format, users can easily turn their pictures into vintage Gameboy and arcade-style photos.
Not just a photography app, Photogotchi takes its name, and inspiration, from the 90s, after the virtual pet craze of that era. It is also the first app to combine photography and a real-time, interactive game.

“We wanted to create an app that would capture the nostalgia of the Tamagotchi era, that was a big part of growing up in the last decade. We’ve improved upon that experience by mashing up the two things that we love in the age of the smartphone: camera filters, and fun, engaging games.”

More Here [discovered via Zoe Salditch]

Hulu Cam at Burning Man 2012 

Add video camera to hula-hoop, get experienced volunteers to used said hula-hoop, edit them together and you get an eye-catching experience (to the best of my knowledge, there are no music videos like this). Sure, capturing footage from a hula-hoop has been done before, but not in a setting like this.

Watch below:

Via Reddit - YouTube Link

The Paintings of William Betts 

Artist creates various series of works employing familiar digital reproduction styles, but all are painted with acrylic on canvas. The above works were completed between 2007 to 2011.

Click on the photos for larger versions to see the details.

More of the artist’s website here

Camera to PC Spatial 3D Data Method From Photos 

Project in early stages from Tokyo to quickly digitally reproduce 3D objects from photographs. What differs this to Autodesk 123 Catch is the photographic information is transferred locally to PC over Eye-Fi card as opposed to the cloud. From DigInfo News:

A research group at Tokyo Institute of Technology is developing a system that quickly creates 3D spacial data from photos taken with a digital camera.

“We take pictures using an ordinary digital camera. This camera has an Eye-Fi card, which sends the pictures to a PC wirelessly. This system uses the received pictures to rapidly create a 3D model. A feature of this system is that it doesn’t use any information other than the pictures to construct the 3D data.”

“Other people are researching similar systems. What we’re specializing in is the online aspect. In other words, what’s interesting is, you see the results as soon as you’ve taken the pictures. For example, when aerial photos are processed after saving them, if you need to take more pictures, you have to go out again. But with our system, you can see on the spot whether 3D measurement was successful, so if you don’t have enough pictures, you can just take some more.”

This system uses SfM, or Structure from Motion, which estimates the 3D shape and camera position from several pictures of the same scene. To reproduce spatial position data, it repeatedly identifies and matches characteristic points between two pictures.

More information (including a demonstration video) can be found at DigInfo News here

(PS - DigInfo has been great recently - worth checking regularly)

Inside Out 

Photographic images created from examining camera film ingested by Josh Lake and Luke Evans:

With fellow student Josh Lake, photographic 35mm film was eaten,
digested then excreted out in the dark.

The damage and traces left on the emulsion surface were examined
through a scanning electron microscope.

[Source]

Piksel Bacteria 

iOS Augmented Reality game where red pixel bacteria feed on edges, and is based on a scientific discovery from playing an Atari game:

PikselBacteria is an augmented reality game for iPhone/iPad. It focuses on the bacterium pikselum. The bacterium was discovered in 1985 in the USSR by the scientist Lars Rodkov. He first thought he found a glitch in a bootleg of river raid (an atari 2600 game). But then he discovered, that it was a bacterium living in displays. PikselBacteria are feeding on pixel-edges. They are very rare. Therefore Rodkov developed an attractor to approach and cultivate these bacteria.

Based on his research, And-or developed a game in which you may grow these short-lived bacteria with your camera.

You breed the short-lived bacteria with your camera. Give them food by taking them to an edge and start moving the camera along this edge - and the bacteria will breed instantly and take you to the edge.

Gain research points in growing the bacteria as long as you can! Your highscore shows that you are an avid researcher and observer. Press the icon in the lower right corner of the display and send a picture of the sighted bacteria to the website! Or store it in your photo album for proof.

More information, and links to download the free game, can be found on the project’s website here

Tic Tac Timelapse Camera

Hacked camera fits into Tic Tac container, is attached to amateur racing car. Project by blondihacks: 

Among my more questionable life choices is my regular participation (as part of The B-Team) in the 24 Hours of LeMons endurance racing series. We take old cars (many of which weren’t good when they were new), kit them out with roll cages and such, and race them all weekend. Good times are had by all. A friend of mine is half of the LeMons Supreme Court, and their job is to assign penalties to drivers/teams who do stupid things during the race. This generally involves public humiliation, and is pretty darn entertaining for everyone else. Anyway, one of the other things this chap does is attach timelapse cameras to competitors’ cars. He gets some pretty exciting on-track shots this way. He asked me to make something more disposable to help with this. The fact is, in a race this long and with this many cars (over one hundred is common), some swapping of paint is inevitable. Sooner or later, the camera will be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why not try making something really cheap that, if crushed under the paws of a V8 e30, is no big loss?

He suggested the infamous “808″ camera as a starting point, and after a little research, I was inclined to agree. The 808 is a keychain camera that is cranked out by the fu shipload in China, and they are ridiculously cheap. They can be found on eBay, and other places as well. The quality on them is awful (as you might imagine for that price) but they are quite hackable, and a subculture has developed around them.

You can read about the development of the camera at blondihack’s blog here, or see more photographs taken by the camera here

Touchy 

Experimental social technology project involves helmet installed with camera, yet wearer cannot see without physical touch:

About

This project is a phenomenological social interaction experiment that focuses on the relationship of giving and receiving by literally transforming a human into a camera. Touchy, (the person wearing the device) is blind most of the time until you touch his/her skin. Once vision is given to Touchy, he/she can take photos for you. This human camera, with its unique properties, aims at healing social anxiety by creating joyful interactions.

Social Concern 

It is common for humans to be separated into social bubbles, to avoid sharing social space and to connect to strangers. However, technologies like Internet social networking or the mobile phone loosens social boundaries, hence dehumanizing physical communication. To a certain extent, it generates social anxiety such as the one experienced in the “Hikikomori” and “Otaku” cultures in Japan. Touchy criticizes this phenomenon and suggests a solution by transforming the human being into a social device: a camera. The Touchy project investigates how such a device improves social life, presupposing that a camera is a known tool for sharing memories, valuable moments, enjoyment, emotions, beauty and so forth.

Logitech FotoMan Digital Camera 

The first commercial digital camera, released in 1990. From The National Media Museum:

Logitech FotoMan digital camera, made by Logitech in Switzerland, 1990.

The FotoMan was the first digital camera to go on sale. Fuji had created a digital camera as early as 1988, but it was never commercially available. The FotoMan took monochrome pictures, 32 images could be stored in the camera, and images could be uploaded to a PC using the cable supplied with the camera. The price of the camera on its release in 1990 was £499. 

[Link]